RESTAURANT WITH DAYTIME COWORKING

BAR PRIMI + SPACIOUS
New York, New York
2016–2019

BAR PRIMI + KETTLESPACE
New York, New York
2019–2020

Piggybacking Tactics Employed:
Share a Resource to Multiply Use

Throughout the past decade, a suite of ambitious startup companies, flush with venture capital, have developed innovative protocols and digital infrastructures to facilitate use-multiplying and resource-sharing piggybackings in both the workspace and housing sectors. SPACIOUS and KETTLESPACE, two drop-in workspace management companies founded in 2016, tap into the daytime availability of well-designed restaurant spaces and make them available as short-term workspaces until those restaurants open for business at dinner. Unlike coworking giant WeWork (which purchased Spacious in August of 2019, before unceremoniously shuttering it four months later amidst its own financial woes), Spacious and KettleSpace are not leaseholders; they simply manage the contracts, infrastructures, and hospitality operations necessary to provide their service at each partner location and split the resulting profits with the restaurant operator. As of March 2021, KettleSpace was operating only in New York City; and Spacious, before its closing, operated only in New York City and San Francisco—cities where the supply of itinerant office workers is sufficiently high and in relative proportion to the number of high-end restaurants with heavy rent burdens. How this business model will evolve during the long wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is an open question.